%0 Journal Article
%@ 2227-7102
%A Wyness, G
%D 2016
%F discovery:1475194
%I MDPI AG
%J Education Sciences
%K widening participation, higher education, higher education funding policies
%N 1
%T Deserving Poor: Are Higher Education Bursaries Going to the Right Students?
%U https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1475194/
%V 6
%X After the abolition of student maintenance grants in 2016, higher education bursaries will be the major source of non-repayable aid for poor students in England, with £300 m spent per year. The aims of the bursary system were never explicitly laid out by government, making it challenging to evaluate this unique form of aid. In this paper, I examine the bursary system on the grounds of equity and efficiency, using a unique dataset collected from 22 universities. I show that the bursary system is inequitable; as a direct consequence of the decentralized nature of the system, there are vast inequalities in aid receipt among poor students. Nevertheless, I find that the poorest, most able students tend to receive the most bursary aid, suggesting the system could be seen as efficient. Clearer guidance from government on the purpose of bursaries is required in order to understand whether the system is meeting its aims, and how it could be improved.
%Z This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.